The Urban Book of the Dead (3 page)

I asked her “I didn’t know you were dead?”

She replied with a tight smile “I might as well have been dead to you.”

“So not true!” I said with conviction.

I asked her “Is cooking heroin the sort of thing you do for recreation now?”

She looked up from the low flame on the cooker and said with a smile “No it’s the sort of thing you do for recreation. It killed you didn’t it?”

We went into the living room and she hastily slipped off her bra and panties, hopping backwards on one leg as she did it, apparently oblivious that we had never done the thing we were about to do before. I got undressed just as hastily. My clothes were rubbery but they parted from my body with a bit of peeling.

For the next two hours we made it in every position we could think of, mostly floating to the ceiling. Missionary, doggy, her on top, sixty nine; and a lot in-between and made up on the spot, a lot of architectural humping was done for the most major satisfaction. At one stage my cock hit the light bulb and burst with the heat, she captured droplets on her tongue, then she sculpted my stomach and made me a bigger, better one, smiling with complicity in my eyes as she yanked and moulded it “There that’s all better.” She said rubbing it longer between two flat hands. Then we had straight forward sex all the way one last time and as she came her face changed just a little in personality, although it was still some model of her own variables, and as she came, she shouted in Italian something I did not understand “Tu una sesso dio in piggamo”.

We floated down and she came to land on the settee and I landed in a kneeling position besides her.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I said you’re a sex god in pyjamas! You make me come!” She replied; fired up like I had never seen her before. “Grande sessualita scimmia”

I was suspicious “Who are you?” I asked.

“Guardare!” She shouted pointing at Allori’s Judith on the wall.

The picture of the unknown Judith who was not Mazzafirri was missing from the wall, Allori’s severed head was hanging in mid air.

“You tricked me!” I said “You’re her historical duplicate, a mere resemblance! God has tricked me!”

She slapped me “So I’m not good enough! You couldn’t tell the difference!”

She started to wrestle with me blushing bright red her body getting hot. She seemed to push when I pulled and pull when I pushed. Like she was guiding me to stretch her out of shape. Her arms wound around her body in the struggle. As she got on top of me and had hold of my hands, she was using my magic to mould her with my hands which just felt like they were struggling. She shrank into her carapace. Her body was now burning me and my fingers fried and sizzled. I broke away and stepped back. One. Two. Three. Four long strides.

I was face to face with a giant four legged crab, her neck less face welded on her shell. She jumped off the couch and took two steps towards me, melting my carpet into tar where ever her feet landed, which surrounded her in black toxic smoke. She spoke to me. “Magic here is will. Your will is strong so he fears you and has not risked trying to destroy you. You will need to solicit my help. I am the scarlet whore won to your side.”

Judith, whore of Babylon, turned one hundred and eighty degrees; burning a circle in the carpet; then drew a five pointed star and disappeared in an explosion of red plasma, in which one imagined or saw shapes as looking into a fire. That is magic and here to imagine is to see the real.

Some one was sitting in the corner of my room rolling a spliff. It was Jay, “Hello Monster” he said, that being my nick name from old.

I was taken aback “What are you doing here, are you dead?”

He had grown back his mop of curly hair, and had the features some one would paint him into a ‘David’ one day. He let out a breath that winded down “Hahhh” He said, “To tell you the truth I don’t know, I met a rather fetching woman of a shade of red, at the pub, and she said you might need some advice that only I could give, but she didn’t say what, if your in any kind of trouble I can still get some of the lads together”

I looked sternly “Hold that thought.” I said.

He continued rolling out a length of cigarette paper from a packet, he reminded me of a tailor sizing up a suit, but I knew he was sizing up the situation and the paper was meditational

I continued “Well the thing is; I have to kill God, but he’s much too strong.”

Jay smiled, it was home territory, the spliff was coming together and so were his thoughts, “Well you see Monster, strength is all mental, take those weight lifters, or when I fought those cops, its up here” he pointed to his head, displacing his curly hair, “when Biggles put his hands right through both sides of the door at the squat”

I butted in, “when I cracked the police handcuffs on LSD because I was scarred”

Jay looked anxious “So you said. Look Monst that had nothing to do with me. But what you did that night, that’s the sort of thing you should, change, you’re a strong bloke, but I bet if you went back to that time, and reinvented what happened, you would be a stronger bloke.”

Warmth flowed off Jay, even though I knew he was a complete psychopath, I warmed off the fire in his eyes but remained cold, so I said coldly rather than warmly, not succumbing to the heat “Yeh what did happen Jay.”

Jay had finished burning some draw into the spliff, putting thought into the careful crumbling, that was really thought about what he was going to say “We will never know, we were all on drugs, and that’s a different world, in your own line, things happened that only made sense in your line, tell me again what happened that night, up until when you left.” Having wrapped things up he wrapped the joint up, licking and sticking it down, no loose ends.

Preparing for what I had to say I asked “Do you still see APE?”

Jay looked sad “Ahh, ‘Anarchy, Peace and Ecstasy’ dead in a toilet, heroin overdose, most people we knew are dead, I hope I’m not, sounds like and adventure though, better than travelling.”

He looked straight at me “What really happened Monster, then we can change it.” He lit the spliff, and then passed it straight to me. Almost touching my hand he said “We went round to the Irish, soon after you had broke their window. Was it the Irish?”

“No. You know who it was.” I replied sternly.

Jay continued “Was it the Carters. You got some of your gear there.”

“No. It wasn’t” I looked straight at Jay, “You were going to get me a gun Jay.”

I passed the spliff to Jay, he smiled “Why did you want the gun?”

“Don’t you know?” I asked, calm, quiet, friendly and with complicity.

“You never said.” The conversation passed back and forth.

Me “That’s not what I meant, didn’t you know?”

Jay “I can’t remember.”

Me “It was because of what happened to Jane, I let it go after that, because she came to see me. Jane was raped and I was going to kill them, I was fucked anyway, thought I was fucked for good.”

Jay “So you think it was them?”

Me “This is just a little thing Jay, much worse things happened than this, before all this.”

Jay “And you never want to discuss it again.”

Me “Not here and now, maybe not ever.”

Jay “So you hocked you’re records with Alex, you got acid from mad Willy, the crazy black guy who thought he had a pig in his belly, you went up to the top flat and you got whiz from Lynn, no doubt passing some big muscular guy in the process and going over the open landing like a draw bridge, that legend has it many people have dropped to their deaths from. After having already had a bad day and a conversation with a police woman you should never, never of had, paranoid because your getting a gun and hunting some very bad people down, and then we deliberately send you on a bad trip, but as you say, worse things have happened.”

A determined anger was gripping me “You know all that, it’s as good as said, I think I should go back there at the point it went wrong, and change the outcome, after leaving. We can blame the state, capitalism or God, they are all one and the same to me, read, they are all one and the same, I don’t discern any difference. I blame the general not the particular. The particular is only a special breed of the general.”

Jay’s body started to fade; he looked down at himself and held his still solid hands up, “Looks like I have to go!” He smiled. His hands so white were the last thing to disappear.

A vortex like a tornado of light came into existence after Jay disappeared; I stepped into it and directed my self where I wanted to go. I travelled down my time line and I saw the past fly threw me. Each time I was in my own body. I felt the effects of chasing the dragon, as I came round at a friends flat, my hands stuffed down my pants I became hazily aware I was watching morning television, then on the television came Bruce Lee, then it was me on the television fighting a gang of Asians their car stopped in the middle of the road where I had drunkenly swore at them, the words “I’m not racist but . . .” spoke in my head, then I was fighting a gang of kids after I had beaten their leader, blocking and punching untouchably, I was down on the floor my jumper over my head being kicked as I drummed ones head into the pavement. I saw a drunk man with a Stanley knife trying to steel food at my flat, I hit him, then I was at his house meeting his wife and many children. A policeman tried to arrest me for theft of a traffic cone that was propping shut my door, and I put it on my head and laughed “Ne, na, ne, na” I went, and the sound followed me as I ran down the street with Alex, running from Pizza Hut without paying, I could feel pizza and bottles of cider rumbling in my belly, hear Alex shout “Monster!” as she was caught, I remembered to go back to the police station to pick her up, remembering to pick up the gift cannabis plant I had hidden in the bin on the way, at the station, the police officer so dead pan “Is that a cannabis plant?”, this all happened in the time it takes to tell it, I stopped off at the right point, though I could of drifted all day.

I will refer to my self as ‘Monster’ during the whole of the next episode to delineate the difference between ‘I’ the ghost and ‘I’ the historical entity.

I was back at the Avenham flat, plastic litre bottles on the floor are washed up messages from the twilight zone, washed up on a beach of ash as no one uses the ashtrays, or they just use empty beer cans that again end up on the floor. There are actual foot prints in the ash. The bottles have tried to make the evolutionary step and walk, they have lungs, and they are called lungs. The bottoms are cut off and plastic bags cello taped to them to push in and fill up with cannabis smoke. The room is long for a council high rise, there is room for an old sofa at the back, that is probably a death trap from the seventies, striped white and orange and so long there is plenty of room for the bearded hippy lying there to stretch out with an orange cushion on his head, the cushion matches the curtains. So does the hippy’s beard. There are several other chairs where you would strategically place them near a glass coffee table in a large room. The coffee table has a bong, pipes made out of cardboard tubes, one of which Jay was lighting, several cans and ash trays.

Monster was tripping, four grams of speed and four tabs of LSD running through his system. Monster studied his hands in the air seeing burning. I closed my eyes momentarily and cried dryly, covering my face with my wings, I again opened my eyes, a white feathery gauze beautifying reality, not wanting to see things the way they were.

Monster looked from his hands to Alex standing near the door; she was so young then in her snaky dreadlocks and army jacket. “I keep thinking I’m burned Alex.” He said begging. Deliberate scares from all concerned were sending him over the edge.

Jesus the hippy was lying on the sofa covering his face with a cushion, Jay; and Biggles; who is dark skinned, in an unavoidable Nosferatu stance because of his great height, his long boots going right up his legs; walked up to him making prints in the ash with their boots, “Wake up Jesus!” shouted Jay, playfully, but with an unmistakable edge in his voice. Jesus got up and took the cushion away, tears dripping from his beard, his face red, “He’s my friend!” shouted Jesus.

How fast can a thought be thought; how long does it take to create a reality. In a split second Monster new that he had been set up, that he had been burnt and he looked at Alex in the door way and saw her as Jane crying, he grabbed her to protect her his voice cried “Ohh”, then Alex was Alex again but a look of astonishment on her face, and then looked away angrily, with the stare of hate she had been giving him all night.

Monster went for the second door way in the hall and Alex followed him there. My wings were restless, I had to keep rustling them, they wanted to intervene or take flight, they kept moving, wanting to push themselves in the scene, working automatically from own deep desire. Monster was still not sure Alex was Alex, or if she was he wanted her out of there. “Come with me Alex.” My self ‘Monster’ said to Alex in the outer doorway. Alex hesitated, she took two steps forward and one back, Monster turned and left.

He made his way down the steps of the flats, five floors, and ten landings. I chased after him my wings dragging on the steps, I had a metallic taste in my mouth from running, I shouted but it was like my mouth was clogged with blood, blood and my own feathers, I couldn’t breathe. My diaphragm heaved, he was getting ahead of me disappearing from sight, but I heard the steps fading in the distance.